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Thursday, September 6, 2012

Obama and the Infernal Serpent

The
president may not be aware of it, but envy has always been regarded as a
sin. Envy of the rich is actually one of the seven "deadly sins,"
according to Christian belief. The idea that envy is "deadly" is so
deeply rooted in Western civilization that only a politician profoundly
ignorant of that tradition, or dismissive of it, would fail to regard
envy as wrong.

For
the ancients, envy was such a harmful instinct that it was represented
as a mythological figure of destruction. One of the earliest Greek
writings, Hesiod's Works and Days, describes envy as
nasty-mouthed, physically repulsive, and rejoicing in human suffering.
It is the sort of evil that Hesiod associated it with the decline of
civilization ruled by a corrupt race of "iron" men (not the gold or
silver of the past). Even 2,800 years ago, it was understood that envy
is an evil that arises in the late stages of great civilizations, when
political life begins to focus on how to redistribute goods rather than
how to produce more goods. Great writers have always understood this
fact.

In his great compendium of classical mythology, the Metamorphoses,
Ovid depicts the foul goddess Envy eating the flesh of snakes, a food
appropriate for such a venomous deity. The horrid figure of Envy is
lethargic, her teeth are covered with green mold, and venom drops from
her mouth. Envy is unsmiling, except when another suffers pain. And
what Envy most dislikes, according to Ovid, is the success of another
person. Envy's punishment is that it can never be at peace because its
scope is limitless. The sight of anyone's success, anywhere, is enough
to disturb the envious heart (summarized from Metamorphoses, Book II, lines 768-782).

According to the classics, envy is pureevil.
It is the only one among the deadly sins that is purely negative
(pride, lust, gluttony, anger, sloth, and greed are sinful and equally
deadly, but they are not spiteful). For this reason, envy is the
hallmark of those who are spiritually empty -- those, for example, who
cannot run on their own records and so resort to an attack on others who
do have a record of accomplishment. As the English poet
Charles Churchill put it, "[n]o crime is so great to envy as daring to
excel."

For
those who are eaten up with envy, Mitt Romney's success at Bain Capital
seems nothing less than criminal. Not only did Romney excel at
business, but he also succeeded in organizing the 2002 Olympics in Salt
Lake City and in governing the very liberal state of Massachusetts with
at least a modicum of sense. He is the kind of man whom the ancients
would have regarded as noble and virtuous. For Obama, he is just an
easy target for the politics of wealth envy.

The
ancients understood envy better than we do today. Envy was always
associated with snakes because it is a destructive emotion that creeps
into one's heart. It is sluggish, gradually overturning one's nobler
feelings and replacing them with venomous hatred. Like our current
occupant of the White House, whose speeches have become harsher as the
campaign draws on, envy is ruthless and unsmiling.

Once
unleashed, envy knows no bounds. It slithers into men's hearts,
poisoning their relationship to others, destroying families, ruining
friendships, and making the governance of society impossible. That is
what has now been unleashed in America. Employing the tactics of Saul
Alinsky, Obama approaches every political problem with the intent of
isolating his target and exploiting the destructive emotions of envy and
distrust.

All
of Obama's talk about "fairness" is nothing but an attempt to gin up a
sense of grievance and exploit it for his own purposes. The rich should
be taxed more, he says, not because it would bring in more revenue or
because they are not taxed enough already, but because they need to be
punished. We hate them because they have succeeded and we have not.
Even 2,800 years ago, that kind of populist demagoguery was understood
to be dangerous.

It's
not just the classical and Biblical writers who regarded envy as a
deadly sin. That notion was echoed in the writing of Western Europe and
America until quite recently. Consider the work of John Milton, the
greatest moral writer of our civilization. "Th' infernal Serpent; he it
was, whose guile stir'd up with Envy and Revenge, deceiv'd the Mother
of Mankind," Milton wrote in Book I of Paradise Lost. That
infernal serpent was none other than Satan, who tricked Eve into
partaking of the apple of knowledge. I won't go so far as to suggest a
direct parallel here, but it is true that our current president is
counting on the women's vote to win re-election.

What
I would say is that envy is not an acceptable reason to re-elect a
president, or anyone else. Instead of stirring up hatred and division,
Obama should be uniting Americans. Times are hard, harder for some than
for others, but we are all citizens of one nation, and no group or
class should be singled out for blame. We are a noble people, and envy
is beneath us. Now is the time for great and virtuous leaders to govern
in the best interest of the nation as a whole.

That,
unfortunately, is not the message we're hearing from the Obama
campaign. At a July 27 campaign event in McLean, Virginia, Obama informed
the audience that he does not "believe in top-down economics." He
believes in "middle-out economics and bottom-up economics." That's to
say, those "at the top" are the enemy. They "didn't build" their
businesses or their careers, no matter how much effort went into it.
(Try telling that to Donald Trump or Lebron James.) The rich have no
right to what they have earned. It's "us" -- the middle and lower
classes -- versus "them," the rich. That is Obama's message at every
stop.

Within
classical Christian civilization, that appeal to wealth envy has always
been regarded as crass, and rightfully so. The candidate who runs on
wealth envy is stirring up foul emotions that are even more destructive
to the poor than they are to the rich. What does the young man from
Camden or East L.A. conclude when his president tells him that his
poverty is the fault of the rich? He concludes that there's nothing he
can do about his poverty. He might as well drop out of school, quit
work, do drugs, and be done with it.

That
is the kind of destructive emotion that envy unleashes. Every writer
in the Western tradition has regarded envy as contemptible. It is only
among the followers of Saul Alinsky that envy is regarded as a good,
because for them, it is a useful tool for gaining power.

Envy,
according to the British philosopher Robert Burton, is nothing less
than "a foretaste of hell upon earth." Obama's campaign rhetoric offers
more than a glimpse of what that infernal world would be like.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and article on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

This website is dedicated to a renewal of Christian culture. It is inspired by Sir Winston Churchill, a valiant defender of Christian civilization, who believed "we have a great treasure to guard; that the inheritance in our possession represents the prolonged achievement of the centuries." With Churchill, we believe that a "fraternal association" of the English-speaking peoples must "for their own safety and for the good of all walk together in majesty, in justice and in peace.”